This post covers a topic that I’ve struggled a lot with and that is very common among graduate students: imposter syndrome. That voice in your head telling you you’re not good enough, not qualified, just “faking it” through everything. This post was inspired by Valerie Young’s book “The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women.”. In it, I summarize some of the ways imposter syndrome can manifest and what you can do to start tackling that inner voice.

The paper I wrote about outlines a challenge for astronomers to produce the best code possible for estimating the local expansion rate of the universe (also called H0). Challengers will start with samples of gravitationally-lensed galaxies, and from those they’ll have to work out the H0 of each sample. Only the challenge creators know what the right answer is! The ultimate goal of this challenge is to create the best code possible ahead of LSST, which is going to produce an unimaginable amount of data during its...

The post summarizes a session at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical
Society’s Division of Planetary Science in Provo, Utah. Specifically, the
session was all about the mysterious (and still hypothetical) new
planet proposed in the outer solar system. To learn more, go check out the post!

(Also, if you like learning about space and planetary stuff, you should
definitely go check Emily out!)

Just…wow. I feel like I’ve been saying this for the past several years with all of the amazing traveling I’ve been fortunate to do during my physics career, but this was honestly one of the coolest experiences I’ve had. There are simply no words to describe witnessing a total solar eclipse, but I’ll try my best anyway!

I’ve witnessed a couple of partial eclipses in the past, but being present for a total solar eclipse was a top item on my bucket list. I had been anticipating the eclipse of August 21, 2017 for years, and I knew I had...

Welcome to Part 3 of my blog series documenting my amazing time as an instructor of a ground-based astronomy course based at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, AZ! If you missed Part 1 or Part 2, be sure to head over there and check out those posts! If you haven’t browsed through my photo album of the trip, you should do that also! Enough chatter, let’s get to the post.

Monday, May 22nd

Not going to lie, this was probably one of my favorite days out of my month in Arizona (or in...